The 19th-century English theologian and churchman John Henry Newman spent much of his career reflecting on this question. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he wrote to his father that “if anyone should ask me what qualifications were necessary for [admission], I should say there was only one—Drink, drink, drink.” As a mature thinker, Newman developed a sophisticated argument against those who favored the uncompromising secularization of the university, contending that their position stemmed from overconfidence in the power of human knowledge. Edward Short writes:

Before converting to Roman Catholicism, Newman . . . sent a series of brilliant letters to the Times of London opposing a reading room sponsored by Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham that would exclude all books of theology from its shelves. Later published as The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), the letters attacked the cult of knowledge, which Newman saw as an outcrop of the relativist and atheist rationalism of the Enlightenment. . . . Since the false god of knowledge still stultifies the study of the liberal arts, his objections to it remain compelling.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.